The friends I saw it with and I didn't know about the CGI ahead of time and while we realized there was something a bit off about Tarkin, it definitely wasn't all that noticeable. Leia retroactively made me realize Tarkin was CGI but it still wasn't all that bad. We saw it in 3D so... yeah, maybe that made it less obvious.

Finally found some time to see the film. Just read to the bottom of page 1 of this thread (of three, but can't force myself to not post yet).

I shall, even after all this time, stay away from explicit spoilers.

Some gratuitious call-forwarding I quite liked. "Those two guys", who must have got off-planet sharpish ready for the Ep4 scene. The phrase the droid never quite said, plus the phrase the droid didn't quite finish. "Air shaft" combat. uhhh... loads more points that I'll remember later, I know.

There was some stuff to (grudgingly) complain about, though. It's quite obvious that many elements of the (interleved) action sequences are perfectly suited for a video-game campaign mode. "Go over there and plant these devices", "Get through that gap before time runs out", "A very specific lever must be pulled", "Quick, go modulate the doohickey by resetting the watchamacallit over on that thingamabob that is conveniently placed to put you in random danger from someone who would seem to have no reason to attack your location". All these tasks and more either for the Player Character or an NPC that the PC is going to be running interference for. I imagine it'll be done well in the Lego version of the game, but only because you expect a convenient maze of items/cover between you and an opposing force, to navigate.

And when they made the big shot at the end... 10/10 for accuracy, if they were actually going for the bit where the heroes had just been, but given what the follow-through was going to do anyway to the locality, it surely couldn't have been because they were hoping to not have to just aim at the ground and accomplish the same job but without the lingering threat between. (i.e., having already decided that they didn't mind losing their own seemingly important facility, they still only deferred it, with no obvious benefit in doing it that way).

I liked it. I welled up on seeing Carrie Fisher (not so much Peter Cushing... not quite as raw) and I could see how it necessarily built to the intro of ANH, with just a few of those bugbears that I'll have to mull over. Won't go and rewatch it at the cinema (I've got other films on backlog that still need a cinema viewing first!), but might work out a way to Marathon it at some future time, in-between putting the Prequel Trilogy somewhere safe from being watched and dragging out the least re-Lucassed versions of the OT available (needs the re-hooking up of the VHS box, methinks).

I feel like I want my wasted time returned to me. The cinematography was so dark that you couldn't see what was happening, or who most of the characters were. Just saw the film and I couldn't tell the pilot from the captain if you showed me character photos. It was almost as good as an installment in those serial westerns from the 40s. It felt like it was patched together from Star Wars character types. There wasn't a joke in the whole script. Why am I supposed to care about this kid again? The physics of the ships makes no sense-half the time they maneuver in gravity and atmosphere with no backwash, it takes ridiculous amounts of damage to break anything, and why are there guys standing in towers with binoculars? Even for five bucks I overpaid.

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish.

PAstrychef wrote:There wasn't a joke in the whole script. [...] and why are there guys standing in towers with binoculars?

I actually liked that brick-joke. I surmise, from both past films (future canon) and this that the observer is using the Mark I Eyeball to direct a manual camera at all notified arrivals and departures. Exavtly why, I don't know, but perhaps it is a task not possible to give a droid (or droidlike, like an R2 head or Jabba's Door Answering Eyeball) due to issues of jammability, or just the lack of a suitable model in the Alliance ranks/warehouses.

So they have a guy stuck on a crows-nest pole (such as perhaps cannibalised from a Juggernaut Clone-era Tank) aiming the go-pro as told to by the landing/take-off control.

But that time when Rogue One leaves without proper authorisation, he doesn't aim the thingamajig, he just looks at the ship, perhaps wondering why he hasn't been told about the departure.

Wait what? There were at least a couple of points where I laughed (shooting the K2S0 lookalike, them hooding the already blind Chirrut, some comment K2S0 makes about surviving in space etc). It's at the very least on par with anything in the original trilogy, probably more humor than those in fact.

The only thing that explains the watchtower would be if they didn't want to use some sort of powerful ground based sensors to avoid giving away their position if that could be detected from space. Hence you have one dude with a small hand scanner determining things. Even that seems like a pretty big stretch though.

PAstrychef wrote: The physics of the ships makes no sense-half the time they maneuver in gravity and atmosphere with no backwash, it takes ridiculous amounts of damage to break anything, and why are there guys standing in towers with binoculars? Even for five bucks I overpaid.

... It's a movie series centered on psychic samurai with laser swords. The Star Wars movies* have never been concerned with the questions of "how it works", all the "science" in it's fiction is "sufficiently advanced" to be magic in it's fantasy-esque tale of the fall and redemption of the Skywalker family.

If your suspenders of disbelief cannot hold up under the load required by the star wars franchise I humbly suggest these are not the movies you are looking for.

*There's extended canon to explain everything, but the extended canon comes -after- the original works rather than as an intended mechanic of the initial universe building. The explanations are crafted to explain the stylistic visuals, rather than the visuals being crafted to match physical engineering.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

I have been suspending my disbelief about these movies since I was 13, the year the original was released. I enjoyed most of them. In this particular film they failed at continuity. I have ignored the whoke extended universe of novels, cartoons, action figures, breakfast cereals, etc.

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish.

PAstrychef wrote:I have been suspending my disbelief about these movies since I was 13, the year the original was released. I enjoyed most of them. In this particular film they failed at continuity. I have ignored the whoke extended universe of novels, cartoons, action figures, breakfast cereals, etc.

In terms of things like jet wash? I seem to recall the Millennium Falcon taking off at least twice in the original series where it should have roasted the attendant storm troopers if jet wash was a thing. Slave 1 as well I imagine. Without looking at the expanded universe I'd assume some sort of anti-grav when inside a planetary atmosphere rather than direct thrusters.

Honestly the only thing that seemed to be in the movie ONLY for drama was the damn claw machine to get at the plans. Why an archiving system would work like that I have no idea. Maybe if that was the way to get the actual hard drive sure, but it seemed to imply that was the standard way anyone would need to use to even look over the plans, which is just plain absurd.

Chen wrote:Honestly the only thing that seemed to be in the movie ONLY for drama was the damn claw machine to get at the plans. Why an archiving system would work like that I have no idea. Maybe if that was the way to get the actual hard drive sure, but it seemed to imply that was the standard way anyone would need to use to even look over the plans, which is just plain absurd.

What is ludicrous is something that has been endemic to the Star Wars universe since the beginning: Bottomless pits with no guard rails. Apparently the EMpire's equivalent of OSHA -requires- that every installation has a minimum of one interior facility with no intervening floors and no way for a humanoid worker to access the space safely.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

Chen wrote:Honestly the only thing that seemed to be in the movie ONLY for drama was the damn claw machine to get at the plans. Why an archiving system would work like that I have no idea. Maybe if that was the way to get the actual hard drive sure, but it seemed to imply that was the standard way anyone would need to use to even look over the plans, which is just plain absurd.

Considering how the data concerned was highly confidential, that access to it was necessarily restricted to those with physical access to the retrieval arm's dedicated control-panel (normally, without making actual entry into the store stack, just needing to be shown the module by the usual retrieval method), and there was no way of doing this remotely (on-base, on-island, on-planet or of course via a Galactic Internet request), it was actually a fairly well set up system to protect some unknown yottabytes, maybe, of the Empire's most voluminous yet Top Secret records that were not (at least in their entirety) required for direct and immediate access. Elsewhere in that stack, there were doubtless things like the old senatorial Expense Claims made by Jar Jar Binks and Sheev Palpatine, long since beyond use, but not just /dev/nulled (because authoritarian regimes tend to really love 'paperwork', even if they later come to regret it).

On the whole, I think this particular Off-Site Secure Backup site concept wasn't so badly construed. I'm unsure about some of the aspects1, but as the repository of the information vital to the nascent Rebellion (or at least the best hope they have to get at it all without going to the actual construction site and/or piecing together loads of confidential subsets of the data currently held by multiple subcontractors) it was nominally the kind of setup I would have expected, give or take the architectural peculiarities already noted.

The continuous flow of (normally authorised and certified) traffic to and from the planet, bringing additional records and perhaps taking copies of authorised retrievals away again - alongside supplies and relief troops for the garrison protecting the complex - indicates a brisk trade in protected physical data transfers (if only the Rogue Onean team could have taken over a legitimate shuttle-service to the complex and usurped that retrieval mission to their own, more Mission Impossible than Dirty Dozen, or even Where Eagles Dare...).

But I'm still left wondering about the possible Secondary/Tertiary/etc backup Archive Facilities. Maybe this was the only one considered secure enough for the data they needed, but one has to hope (unless this is why the Eps3-6 Empire has a degree of zeerust to its Emperical efficiencies, to explain some of its failings and military minimalism) that most of the rest of the data eventually lost is also stored elsewhere...

1 e.g. the Halo-like 'level design', apparently creating a buffer zone between non-priority ship landing pads and the main complex, but apparently with insufficient fencing (real or virtual-via-sensors) to actually stop, slow or reveal unauthorised incursions between different parts of the landing-pad atolls, and insufficient multi-factor identity confirmation, should enemy agents or droids manage to infiltrate the ranks of the respective 'faceless drones', and how Bodhi managed to defeat the otherwise well-designed Physical Firewall seperation to get tapped into the non-ship communication system, etc...

The setup of the facility itself was fine. I was concerned that you had to use a MANUAL claw machine interface to get at the records. I'm pretty sure the linked existing data center runs that robot via entering a command to retrieve something and then the robot going to get it for you, rather than you needing to drive the robot manually to the proper drive and pick it up without dropping it.

There's no "Data Centre", insofar as data-processing. It's a data storage array into which you insert things, store them for a while (if not 'forever') and occasionally retrieve them. (A bit like the system described here1, which first came to my mind.)

If the complex weren't by now on lockdown (mostly against the outside), there may have even been other arms grabbing other modules, perhaps semi-manually, perhaps (at the lower, less information-sensitive storage levels/unseen peripheral stacks?) more of a push-button/voice-id-response automated process, but here at the top levels (of the central stack, assuming there were those others, in separate side-shafts) with the really juicy stuff, only a trained manual control of the arm from a specifically isolated console might be acceptable, to prevent accidental/malicious remote retrieval of these highly confidential modules, and putting them (unknowingly) onto an outbound ship that could then be ambushed for all the Super Secret Squirrel goodies it contained. (If the ship concerned wasn't already compromised by compatriots of the 3117-h4x0rs!)

Or, at least, that makes sense to me.

Addendum:As a design element, assuming they needed such extreme verticality (rather than mostly horizontal 'shelving', or multiple shorter stacks spread warehouse-wide), I might have been tempted to go for a shaft drilled into the ground. Risk of flooding aside (with all the other stuff like atmospheric forcefields, and even decent lining of the shaft up until way-above-high-tide mark on the surface complex buildings, I'm sure they could have secured against that) a subteranean complex would be far less vulnerable and easier to recover from the attack of anything short of orbital bombardment (which the tower is at least as vulnerable to, never mind low-power Death Star blast to the vicinity), more secure from other attempts at physical ingress by unauthorised individuals, and does just about everything the tower does much better, apart from "looking good". And we know they haventhe technology! The Naboo power-station, the Endor shield-bunker, etc...

1 But I disagree with that assessment. The guy was clearly looking for some code snippet that he had once written (or other details of an old backdoor method), perhaps in an idle moment, to save him time in putting together the targeted worm/whatever that he probably never thought he was ever going to use in anger, but now clearly relishes the prospect of the intellectual exercise like only a disassociated geek of that kind could. Either without much thought of the morality of subverting 'his' own system, or more likely swayed to take Ryan's bending of the rules as more moral/authoritative than what he knew of Ritter's... Either way, I always remembered the gleam in his eye...

Dauric wrote:What is ludicrous is something that has been endemic to the Star Wars universe since the beginning: Bottomless pits with no guard rails. Apparently the EMpire's equivalent of OSHA -requires- that every installation has a minimum of one interior facility with no intervening floors and no way for a humanoid worker to access the space safely.

Those are actually Safety Pitstm. Pretty much anyone who falls into one is able to survive not only the fall, but also any fatal injuries they might have sustained before falling in.

Luke gets his hand cut off and is able to survive the shock and blood-loss by falling into the Bespin Safety Pittm. Darth Maul is cut in half and survives by falling into the convenient Safety Pittm in the Naboo power plant. The Emperor gets hurled into a Safety Pittm in his throne room on the second Deathstar after absorbing his own force lightning, and even though the Death Star is subsequently destroyed, he shows up later more-or-less none-the-worse for wear. Luckily, the Star Killer base trash chutes had recently been upgraded with Safety Pittm technology, allowing Captain Phasma to survive its destruction and she's been confirmed to be in the next movie. Jabba has Safety Pittm technology installed in his Sarlacc in hopes that it would prolong the suffering of those he flung into the pit, but it backfired and allowed Boba Fett to escape.

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

I just watched it for the first time today (I know, I know, I'm late). As a 17 year old, I found myself giggling a couple times as I thought about how the plot would've been different if they had the same conveniences communication-wise that we do. The scene where the pilot had to dive across a dangerous gap to connect the cable- I just couldn't stop picturing him staying huddled behind his shield, connecting via Bluetooth. And the holograms are way less convenient than skype. I kept thinking about how I was spending time in a futuristic world... created in the eighties. Since the plot was so linear, with not a lot of sub-plots or side stories, I honestly had a hard time seeing past that.